I couldn’t square my grandfather’s idyllic stories with this nightmare house, nor the idea that he’d found refuge here with the sense of disaster that pervaded it.

Ransom Riggs -- Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

In the end, they invited eighty people to a small, weathered chapel on Cumberland Island in spring 1997; they honeymooned in Cancun, which ended up being an idyllic choice for both of them.

Nicholas Sparks -- The Choice

The idyllic scene exploded into frenzied action.

Farley Mowat -- Never Cry Wolf

All in all, Narewka in the 1930s was a pretty idyllic place to grow up.

Leon Leyson -- The Boy on the Wooden Box

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An idyllic childhood, the piece says.

Christina Baker Kline -- Orphan Train

She had not completely lied to me earlier, she insisted, when she described the idyllic years of her childhood.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

Luma’s childhood was idyllic by most measures, and certainly by comparison to those of most in Jordan.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

When most Lackses talked about Henrietta and Day and their early life in Clover, it sounded as idyllic as a fairy tale.

Rebecca Skloot -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The crowd of predominantly women conferred at that point, knowing that Himmel Street was not exactly the epitome of idyllic Molching living.

Markus Zusak -- The Book Thief

It was perhaps the most idyllic week I’d ever spent.

Nicholas Sparks -- Dear John

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It looked like an old painting, but real—everything achingly idyllic in the morning light—and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

John Green -- The Fault in Our Stars

As the cello played, the video showed painting after painting of angelic-looking figures, idyllic landscapes, and a profile view of a man who was clearly meant to be Christ.

Todd Burpo -- Heaven Is for Real

All heart and soul, and he gave us the most idyllic childhood you could imagine.

Nicholas Sparks -- The Lucky One

The prospect of so idyllic an interim added to the inspired stealth with which he whetted his wire, filed it to a Umber stiletto fineness.

Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood

Other than Ronnie’s preoccupation with her upcoming court appearance, the only blemish on their largely idyllic summer was the continuing presence of Marcus.

Nicholas Sparks -- The Last Song

She could hardly imagine the horrors that must have played out in Martin Vanger’s basement, in the midst of this well-ordered, idyllic spot.

Stieg Larsson -- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

That’s all very well as an idyllic episode, but for your whole life that won’t answer.

Leo Tolstoy -- Anna Karenina

Homer is equally confident that his plan is under way, and has the panache to insert an idyllic comedy of love, the story of Hera’s ’seduction of Zeus in Book XIV.

Homer -- The Iliad

Here, on the hay, in these idyllic surroundings, far from the world and the eyes of men, it wouldn’t matter.

Ivan Turgenev -- Fathers and Sons

Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.

Willa Cather -- My Antonia

They found an idyllic place to camp; in the shade of an outcrop of rocks and close to a stream that meandered into a looping chain of billabongs.

James Vance Marshall -- Walkabout

It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people.

James Joyce -- Ulysses

My fellow-creatures, from whom I was thus separated, began to assume idyllic virtue and beauty in my memory.

H.G. Wells -- The Island of Dr. Moreau

The balmy weather and idyllic life, described in a log now in a teak chest in Randy Bragg’s office, inspired the Lieutenant to name his outpost Fort Repose.

Pat Frank -- Alas, Babylon

In reality, the only thing that interested him on the drive was the pink marble Parthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees, a luckless replica of the idyllic mansions on Louisiana cotton plantations.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera

Let’s explore what happened to send your family from that idyllic existence in Blount out into the night on that bus …. He could still remember his father’s voice in the cellar that day, and the Ping-Pong ball like a small planet suspended in space, his father’s voice holding him captive, enthralled—and yet a small part of him was isolated and alone, a part that was not Adam Farmer any longer but Paul Delmonte.

Robert Cormier -- I Am the Cheese

The wretched conditions they lived in made the circumstances of his own childhood seem idyllic.

Tracy Kidder -- Mountains Beyond Mountains

He had entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to an unintellectual bucolic life, that such charms as he beheld in this idyllic creature would be found behind the scenes.

Thomas Hardy -- Tess of the d’Urbervilles

It stood like a monument on the hill, smack-dab in the middle of a little farming community called, idyllically, Spring Garden.

Rick Bragg -- All Over but the Shoutin’

Okay, call me hopelessly paranoid, but this whole place was starting to seem creep-ily idyllic.

James Patterson -- School’s Out - Forever

The scene was at once idyllic and hallucinatory.

Dave Eggers -- Zeitoun

Her studio greeted him like a memento of his past, his idyllic bachelor past.

Milan Kundera -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being

But everything was not idyllic.

Dan Simmons -- Hyperion

Unlike Skardu’s handful of tourist resorts, which were hidden away among idyllic landscaped grounds, this clean and inexpensive hotel sat on Skardu’s main road without pretension, between Changazi’s compound and a PSO gas station, mere feet from the Bedfords rumbling by on their way back to Islamabad.

Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin -- Three Cups of Tea

The only thing spoiling the idyllic picture was that the walls were topped with razor wire, and there were guards at the entrance to the house.

Nelson Mandela -- Long Walk to Freedom

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -- The Communist Manifesto

Two minutes later—two hectic minutes—they were disturbed by an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the overshoe-closet.

Sinclair Lewis -- Main Street

Where better could it be found than in the wild acreages of idyllic government bird sanctuaries, official parks controlled by powerful moles from the Kuomintang in Taiwan.

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Supremacy

Decidedly this simple and yet idyllic compound of the commonplace had all the luster and wonder of a spiritual transfiguration, the true mirage of the lost and thirsting and seeking victim of the desert.

Theodore Dreiser -- An American Tragedy

His surroundings were no longer terrifying, but almost idyllic.

Robert A. Heinlein -- Tunnel In the Sky

The main dormitory area at Duke was another idyllic spot.

James Patterson -- Kiss the Girls

In the play, Camelot represents an oasis of idyllic happiness in a cold, hard world.

Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard -- Killing Kennedy

Some crack in the perfectly idyllic landscape.

John Green -- Paper Towns

It wasn’t always an idyllic scene.

Nora Roberts -- Summer Pleasures

It’s naive and idyllic, but why not?

Boris Pasternak -- Doctor Zhivago

Life in Plauen became less idyllic after Germany’s defeat.

Eric Schlosser -- Fast Food Nation

It must have been …. idyllic.

Nicholas Sparks -- True Believer

It was a view that I thought of as pastoral, idyllic, a road disappearing into the mist and mountains to a land of no worries.

Abraham Verghese -- Cutting for Stone

Another dispute about the Koran concerns the idyllic black-eyed virgins who supposedly will attend to men in the Islamic afterlife.

Nicholas D. Kristof -- Half the Sky

The Vale of Arryn might have been spared the worst of the war, but it was hardly the idyllic place that Lady Lysa had made it out to be.